Never do Follow for Follow!

It looks so tacky when any company has as many if not more follows than followers, and I've seen a lot of local companies do this. I'm not quite sure if they're explicitly asking people for it or if they just expect it - but it's obviously you aren't listening to 1,000~ people.

They're trying to gain more followers. Generally, unless I find their tweets to be annoying or obnoxious, I will follow anyone who follows me. From time to time, I will follow a couple of hundred people who I have reason to believe might be interested in the same things that I'm selling, often followers of followers. Then I'll give them a week before removing any of them that haven't followed my account in return. Usually, I'll gain ten or twenty out of two hundred.

Now that Twitter has added the ability to ignore someone's post in lieu of unfollowing them, I don't usually unfollow anyone who is following me. Unfortunately, numbers do count for something.

I think companies do that, to attract people so if they use a website like twitter they know it easy to get followers and many will join if it is interesting. In real world, they would find it hard to attract the people like in twitter they can advertise their brand and people will follow it post comments on what they think about it. I sometimes gain a lot of people, depends on what my comment is and do the people like what I posted on twitter and how it looks. I do follow other people, if the comment is interesting or appealing and nice to look at and how much information is there about it.

I understand that numbers count but I've always wondered why anyone would want followers who aren't following them, or who may not even be real people. It's kind of pathetic, but I see that on Facebook and on Twitter. Sure, when you advertise or when you pay someone to provide content for a struggling forum, you're getting people who wouldn't be there otherwise, but at least they're real people and you have an audience.

It looks so tacky when any company has as many if not more follows than followers, and I've seen a lot of local companies do this. I'm not quite sure if they're explicitly asking people for it or if they just expect it - but it's obviously you aren't listening to 1,000~ people.

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I find it really difficult to find followers unless you comment on every single twitter follower. Who has time for that? In saying that the only way to get followers is to like others and follow others but if they do want people to follow, companies should offer specials or freebies to succeed.

I don't really find it tacky. Based on personal experience, it's not easy for companies - especially SMEs or start-ups - to develop a healthy following. The follows are necessary for tagging purposes but the "excessiveness" does stop at some point in the online marketing process.

Getting followers on Twitter is a little difficult but I would rather have loyal followers than fake ones. I never do Follow to Follow because 9 times out of 10 they are really not following your post.

In my opinion, follow for follow is acceptable if the person you are following (with expectations that they will follow back) is an old friend or acquaintance or colleague. The truth of the matter is that everyone on twitter wants an increasing follower count and one easy way to do so is to follow people that you know and who you know. And of course you're not solely following people in your social circle just so they would follow you back but that is one of the underlying, unspoken of reasons. On the other hand, I highly dislike when people follow for a follow and then unfollow you. That should be illegal. Just joking about that but seriously... it is quite annoying.

I think it is perfectly alright. Just as long as the person is posting interesting content of some sort. It is a way to gain more exposure. It can be a little tacky but it is hard to gain a great deal of followers on twitter any other way.

Loyal followers are the best! Their followers may find and follow you in turn. Follow for Follow is OK when you're first starting out. It is probably how most people get started building the numbers. I did invest some time in one of those online schemes to build my numbers, but ended up with so many irrelevant and possibly crazy people that it was beginning to hurt the brand I was trying to build. Much time was consequently wasted setting 'parameters' and religiously unfollowing those filtered out.

I don't agree, I think if you are following you're followers, you are appreciating their interest in your tweets and I find people who do not follow back to be arrogant, I mean what are you going to give if you follow your follower? It is arrogance that you want more followers then follows.
But people who just do follow backs for gaining followers but do not tweet any quality or anything interesting, or just tweet links to stupid affiliated websites, it makes twitter rubbish.

If I remember correctly there are follow for follow groups on twitter. They are set up to help business' spread faster. Not sure 100% how they work, all I know is that you sign up for the group and everyone in that group becomes your follower.

If I remember correctly there are follow for follow groups on twitter. They are set up to help business' spread faster. Not sure 100% how they work, all I know is that you sign up for the group and everyone in that group becomes your follower.

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Almost immediately after you've followed them, most of them unfollow you. Those that don't are often people who simply clutter your news feed with more posts about following.

Awww... thanks for the insight. I have a tweeter account that I opened about 5 years ago... I haven't looked at it since. Found no value or interest in it. I just remember seeing those groups but did not pay much attention to them.

On my last forum, every time I was able to break my record for the number of visitors on the site at one time it was done through a Twitter campaign. I would set up thirty or forty tweets in advance, urging people to join in on every active discussion that we had going on at the time, as well as a few that simply urged them to join the forum itself. Tweeting them one after another, I could bring more than a hundred people to the forum within a couple of minutes. Most of them stayed only a couple of seconds, but every now and then someone would register for an account. You can bring traffic to your site through Twitter, but I don't know that it's worth the bother.

Thanks for the intel. My boyfriend and I have contemplated on testing out creating a store with Facebook using drop shippers and marketing it primarily with social media only to see what would happened. I wasn't sure if tweeter would be a good one to try through.

I'm getting lazy in my old age! I am creating a blog site for us using a template but I am putting up a store through Facebook rather then build these for myself from scratch. I wanted to freshen up on my marketing techniques and test different idea's of methods that could be used so that I would both have more info to bring to this forum and to gain more following in my own blog site and store. We'll see how things go.

Yeah those groups and people #tagging with IFollowBack or #followback etc, very bot like, why would a person needs to do that? I mean followers should be genuine, who follow your tweets and are interested in them, not just a number in your followers list, what is its point anyway? Followers that matter are only those who response to your tweets I think, rt them or reply to them.

It looks so tacky when any company has as many if not more follows than followers, and I've seen a lot of local companies do this. I'm not quite sure if they're explicitly asking people for it or if they just expect it - but it's obviously you aren't listening to 1,000~ people.

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I agree, I started out that way, a follow for a follow, and then I seen that most of my followers where not into the type of music I promote. I unfolllowed most of them. Now I have around 1300 followers and I follow about 300.

Most people just do follow for follow in order to get their follower numbers up. To them, it doesn't matter how many people they follow, as long as they have a large amount following them back. Some people just like having a lot of followers, while others sell tweets and such to third parties, so a large number of "real" followers are needed.

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